Within the prior art, it is a well recognized problem that security of transmission via many data networks such as the Internet is a major concern. Whereas, it is known to use certificates which are issued by a certificate authority to certify that an endpoint is indeed the claimed entity. However, the path between a sending endpoint and a receiving endpoint may contain routers which are not trustworthy. These routers may not be trustworthy because of their particular geographical location or they may be routers which the sending endpoint has knowledge are not desirable to be used to route the sending endpoint's information. This may be because of the country in which the router is located or the corporation or other institution owning/controlling a particular router. The problems arise when a particular router cannot be trusted because of the entity controlling the router or because of poor security maintained on the router that allows third parties to “hack” into the router to obtain information. If the security of the information being transmitted through the router cannot be guaranteed then there is a problem of a third party gaining access to this information and using it contrary to the desires of the user of the sending endpoint. If, for example, financial information is being transmitted, the user may suffer financial damage if the financial information falls into the hands of a third party. For example, credit card number theft is a lucrative crime and an insecure router can be utilized for third parties to gain access to credit card number information. In addition, proprietary information owned by the sending endpoint may be compromised as well by a third party gaining access to it.
A secure path is also desirable in other applications. For example, it is desirable that IP telephone calls be routed over trusted routers to prevent third parties from intercepting voice conversations.
Within the prior art, it is known to establish an Internet or other data connection between two remote locations by choosing routes based on characteristics such as bandwidth, delay jitter, etc.